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The Companion to Latin
American Studies

2
The Companion to Latin American Studies

Edited by Philip Swanson

Professor of Hispanic Studies, University of Aberdeen, UK

3
First published 2003 by Hodder Arnold, a member of the
Hodder Headline Group
Published 2014 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY, 10017, USA
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an
informa business
Copyright © 2003 Taylor & Francis
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
The advice and information in this book are believed to be
true and accurate at the date of going to press, but neither the
authors nor the publisher can accept any legal responsibility
or liability for any errors or omissions.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British
Library

4
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of
Congress
ISBN 13: 978-0-340-80682-1 (pbk)
Typeset in 10 on 121/2Sabon by Phoenix Photosetting,
Chatham, Kent

5
For Nev Mars and all those teachers who first inspired us
and
in memoriam Tony Higgins

6
 Contents
List of contributors
Introduction
Philip Swanson
1 Latin American geographies
Gareth A. Jones
2 Politics and society
Arturo Arias
3 The cultures of colonialism
Luis Fernando Restrepo
4 ‘Civilization and barbarism’
Philip Swanson
5 Latin American literatures
Elzbieta Sklodowska
6 Approaches to Latin American literature
Brian Gollnick
7 Latino US literature
William Luis
8 Latin American visual cultures
Andrea Noble
9 Popular culture in Latin America
Silvia Bermúdez

7
10 Race in Latin America
Peter Wade
11 Gender and sexuality in Latin America
Nikki Craske
12 Latin American Studies and the global system
Jon Beasley-Murray
Glossary
Time chart
Index

8
9
 List of contributors

Arturo Arias is Director of Latin American Studies at the

University of Redlands, California. He is co-writer of the
screenplay for the film El Norte, author of five novels (After
the Bombs, Itzam Na, Jaguar en Llamas, Los caminos de
Paxil and Cascabel), and winner of the Casa de las Américas
Award and the Anna Seghers Scholarship for two of his
novels. In 1998 he published two books of criticism, one on
twentieth-century Guatemalan fiction, La identidad de la
palabra, and another on contemporary Central American
fiction, Gestos Ceremoniales. Recently, he has finished a new
novel in Spanish, Sopa de caracol. Also recently published
are two edited books by him, the critical edition of Miguel
Angel Asturias’s Mulata, and The Rigoberta Menchú
Controversy. He is President of the Latin American Studies
Association (LASA).
Jon Beasley-Murray is Co-Director of the University of
Manchester’s MA in Latin American Cultural Studies. He has
published widely in Latin American Studies and is co-editor
(with Alberto Moreiras) of the collections Subaltern Affect
and Culture and State in Latin America.
Silvia Bermúdez is Associate Professor of Peninsular and
Latin American Literature and Director of the Latin American
and Iberian Studies Program at the University of California,
Santa Barbara. Her forthcoming book La esfinge de la
escritura: Blanca Varela y el canon poético peruano

10
contemporáneo deals with the role of gender and the
aesthetics of modernism in Varela’s writing. Her current work
focuses on the issues of immigration and border-crossing in
the musical production of Latin America and Spain, with
particular reference to rock en español and pop music.
Nikki Craske is Director of the Institute of Latin American
Studies, University of Liverpool, where she is Senior Lecturer
in Latin American Politics. She has written extensively on
Mexican politics and is the author of Women and Politics in
Latin America, associate author (with Sylvia Chant) of
Gender in Latin America, and co-editor (with Maxine
Molyneux) of Gender and the Politics of Rights and
Democracy in Latin America. She is currently preparing a
manuscript entitled The Feminisation of Politics in Mexico.
Brian Gollnick teaches in the Department of Spanish and
Portuguese at the University of Iowa. His research focuses on
modern Mexican literature and Latin American cultural
theory.
Gareth A. Jones is Senior Lecturer in Development
Geography at the London School of Economics and Political
Science. He is Associate Fellow at the Lincoln Institute of
Land Policy, Massachusetts, and the Institute of Latin
American Studies, London. His recent research has been on
access to land for low-income groups in Mexico, the
sociology of land law reform and resistance, the policy
discourses of international urban agencies, and the urban and
cultural geographies of historic centre conservation in Latin
America. His future research will explore how young women
and men negotiate the work–life balance between
employment, training and leisure in the context of poverty
and changing labour markets and ‘family’ expectations (with

11
Sylvia Chant). Dr Jones is a trustee of two non-governmental
organizations, the International Consortium for Street
Children and the International Children’s Trust.
William Luis is Professor of Spanish and English at
Vanderbilt University. He is the author of several works,
including Literary Bondage: Slavery in Cuban Narrative,
Dance Between Two Cultures: Latino Caribbean Literature
Written in the United States and Culture and Customs of
Cuba. Born and raised in New York City, he is widely
regarded as a leading authority on Latin American,
Caribbean, Afro-Hispanic and Latino US literatures.
Andrea Noble is Lecturer at the University of Durham with
teaching and research interests in Latin American visual
culture. She is author of Tina Modotti: Image, Texture,
Photography and co-editor of Phototextualities: Intersections
of Photography and Narrative. She has published articles on
Mexican film and photography in Screen, Women: A Cultural
Review, Tesserae and Framework, and is currently
completing a book on Mexican cinema.
Luis Fernando Restrepo is Associate Professor of Spanish and
Latin American Studies at the University of Arkansas,
Fayetteville. His area of specialization is colonial literature
and culture. He has published Un nuevo reino imaginado: Las
elegías de varones ilustres de Indias de Juan de Castellanos.
His work has also appeared in several journals, including
MLN, Thesaurus, Cuadernos de Literatura, Revista de la
Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana and Pensamiento y
Acción. In 2000 he was a Fulbright visiting scholar at the
Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, Colombia. He is
currently preparing a critical anthology of Castellanos’s epic
history and researching post-conquest Muisca culture.

12
Elzbieta Sklodowska is Professor of Spanish American
Literature at Washington University in Saint Louis and
general editor for Latin American literature of Revista de
Estudios Hispánicos. She is the author of La parodia en la
nueva novela hispanoamericana, Testimonio
hispanoamericano: historia, teoría, poética, Todo ojos, todo
oídos: control e insubordinación en la novela
hispanoamericana and numerous articles on testimonial
literature, Spanish American narrative and Cuban literature.
She is the co-editor (with Ben Heller) of Roberto Fernández
Retamar y los estudios latinoamericanos.
Philip Swanson is Professor of Hispanic Studies at the
University of Aberdeen. He has published widely in the field
of modern Latin American literature and Spanish film,
including books on José Donoso, Gabriel García Márquez and
Spanish American fiction. His most recent book is The New
Novel in Latin America: Politics and Popular Culture after
the Boom. He is currently working on books on Hispanic
American fiction and on borders and crime in film and
fiction. Professor Swanson has held posts in Ireland, the UK
and the USA.
Peter Wade did a PhD in Social Anthropology at Cambridge
University, focusing on the black population of Colombia. He
was a Research Fellow at Queen’s College, Cambridge,
before becoming a Lecturer in Geography and Latin
American Studies at the University of Liverpool. He is
currently Professor of Social Anthropology at the University
of Manchester. His publications include Blackness and Race
Mixture, Race and Ethnicity in Latin America and Music,
Race and Nation: Música Tropical in Colombia. He has a
forthcoming book called Race, Nature and Culture: An

13
Anthropological Perspective. His current research focuses on
issues of racial identity and embodiment.

14
Map of Latin America

15
16
 Introduction
Philip Swanson

Every schoolboy or girl knows that a European mariner,

Christopher Columbus, discovered America, the New World,
in 1492. Yet behind this apparently simple ‘fact’, there lies a
weight of problematic cultural assumption. Columbus did not
really ‘discover’ anything: he simply stumbled across
something that was already there. Indeed he did not really
know what it was he had found, since he thought he had
reached the Indian subcontinent via a western route (hence the
region was originally referred to as the Indies and the natives
as Indians). Moreover the ‘New World’ was not ‘new’ at all.
The indigenous inhabitants of the area had been there since
about 7000 BC, fairly developed societies flourished in the
first thousand years or so AD, and large empires with much of
the organizational apparatus of a state (the Toltecs, the
Chimú, the Mayas and, most famously, the Aztecs and the
Incas) had begun to appear from about AD 900 onwards – all
long before the arrival of Columbus. The very term ‘Latin
America’ refers to the transformed space that grew out of
European (essentially Spanish and Portuguese, i.e. ‘Latin’)
conquest and colonization, with the name America coming
from that of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Florentine
explorer Amerigo Vespucci who is sometimes credited with
first formulating the notion of a ‘new world’.
In other words, from the moment of its inception as a concept,
Latin American history has been perceived through an alien,

17
basically European, mindset. The argument is that the
development of Latin American identity subsequently
involved an internalization of a fundamentally foreign sense
of self that in many ways persists to the present day. Even
political independence was the result of the drive of a Latin
American-born elite who nonetheless prided themselves on
the purity of their inherited European blood which was
untainted by the indigenous. Paradoxically,
post-independence ‘progress’ was also fuelled by European
or, increasingly, North American values and practices,
leading to, for example, the overwhelming economic
influence of Britain in the nineteenth century and the USA in
the twentieth century. The ideas which have dominated Latin
American development up to the twenty-first century
(independence, civilization, progress, democracy, capitalism,
neo-liberalism and so forth) are all basically imported
concepts. In many ways, it was not until 1992 that there was
large-scale public debate and
revisionism of this slanted perspective on Latin America, as –
amidst something of an outcry – the quincentennary
celebrations of ‘discovery’ were hastily transformed into a
celebration of ‘encounter’ between two cultures. And, of
course, Latin American intellectuals have long been vexed by
the question of national and continental identity, while
outside commentators have come to focus more and more on
the redressing of the imbalance in our understanding of ‘Latin
America’. The thrust, then, of much of Latin American
studies, and the thrust of much of this volume, is to question
and problematize the very idea of Latin America and to
present it as a complex and varied phenomenon that has to be
understood on its own terms as well as on European or North
American ones, even if the nature of those terms is itself
highly mobile and irreducible.

18
This book is edited by a specialist in Latin American
literature. In a sense, it is thinking about the ways in which
Latin American literature has been traditionally presented via
Eurocentric models that has prompted the production of this
book. The term ‘Eurocentric’ alludes to the ways in which
Latin American and other cultures have tended to be
examined by means of paradigms that were inherited from
European criticism and that are now seen to underpin much
thinking not only in Europe but also in North America and
what has come to be known at various times as the First
World, the West or the North. To be sure, the precipitous
rejection of so-called European models is itself a problem: the
European inheritance is very much part of Latin American
cultural identity and Latin America today is part of and a
contributor to an increasingly global consciousness. So, when
talking of, say, Latin American literature, the book will use
the conventional periodizations of accepted models of literary
history as applied to Latin America, while exploring
alternative ways of approaching that literature. It will also
extend the notion of ‘culture’ so as to separate it from its
traditional association with literary high culture in order to
explore other cultural manifestations such as film, painting,
muralism, photography, music and even forms of ‘popular’
culture such as dance, soap opera, football and religion.
A basic underlying principle of the book is the idea that
literature and culture do not exist in a vacuum, but very much
grow and operate in a specific socio-political environment.
Hence, the book will also explore Latin American politics and
society, as well as issues such as race, gender and sexuality.
In a way, the book is aimed at students who might have
traditionally approached Latin America via literature, and the
hope is that students will be helped to contextualize that

19
literature in a more informed sense of a Latin American
context while simultaneously garnering a wider and fuller
sense of Latin American culture and society. At the same
time, it is anticipated that the book will be of interest and
value to those whose interests are not primarily literary or
cultural, and it will hopefully demonstrate how literary and
other cultural artefacts and practices are just as essential to an
understanding of Latin American society as, say, the study of
geography, history, sociology or politics
– indeed the hope is that the book will establish intimate
connections between these fields and cultural activity, and
show that the two are not separate.
The book opens and closes with chapters that deal with the
fundamental questions of ‘What is Latin America?’ and
‘Where is it situated?’. Even a concept as seemingly obvious
as ‘place’ will be questioned, and a consideration of Latin
American geographies will point up just how constructed and
mobile our sense of place in relation to Latin America is. The
chapter on politics and society will give a broad overview of
Latin America, sketching its history and how its
contemporary institutions and characteristics have been
shaped. A detailed history of the subcontinent is not the main
concern here, nor is a consideration of the indigenous
pre-Colombian civilizations. Latin America is the starting
point, and hence another early chapter will concentrate on the
culture of the colonial period when the region was still ruled
by the Spanish and Portuguese crowns. The Independence
movement and the process of emancipation will not be
considered in historical detail as such, but these nevertheless
form the background to the chapter on ‘civilization and
barbarism’, a key notion and tension to emerge in the
post-independence period of consolidation and

20
nation-building that would not only mark cultural production
in the nineteenth century but affect it throughout the twentieth
century too.
Having considered this cultural framework, the book will then
offer an authoritative survey of Latin American literature
itself, while following that up with a consideration of the
various debates about how best to approach that literature in
the light of new awareness about the potential limitations of
Eurocentric and related perceptions. Moreover, it is
acknowledged that Latin American culture has spread far
beyond its physical geographical boundaries and is now a
highly important feature of the cultural life of the USA: a
lengthy chapter on Latino US literature will cover this
relatively under-studied area. Notions of culture will then be
expanded with a consideration of visual cultures (including
film and art) and so-called popular culture (ranging from
unofficial religions to soccer, from tango to rock music, from
salsa to soap opera).
Fleshing out the social and political context will be the
concern of the next two chapters, which deal in depth with
issues of race, gender and sexuality in the subcontinent.
Finally, and returning to the idea of unstable and imaginative
geographies, the book will close with a chapter that looks
outwards to Latin America’s position in and in relation to not
only the global system but also global consciousness: rather
than simply being ‘elsewhere’, Latin America will be seen to
inhabit all of us in certain ways.
Obviously, a book like this, which covers a considerable
amount of terrain and diverse disciplines, is a tricky
undertaking. Inevitably, there will be omissions, overlaps and
differences of opinion, but also continuities and consistencies.

21
The enthusiasm and commitment of all the contributors are
warmly acknowledged. In particular, I would like to thank
Luis Fernando
Restrepo, who, like me, put together a chapter at a late stage
due to unforeseen circumstances. The advice and technical
suggestions of a range of friends and colleagues are also
much appreciated, amongst them Daniel Balderston, Jon
Beasley-Murray, Silvia Bermúdez, Julia Biggane, Alvaro
Félix Bolaños, Sara Castro-Klarén, Sylvia Chant, Paul
Garner, Tony Higgins, Kaarina Hollo, John King, Cathy
Shrank and Gustavo Verdesio. Any limitations of the book
are, of course, entirely my own responsibility. Finally, I
would like to thank Elena Seymenliyska, who first
encouraged me to do the book, and Eva Martínez at Arnold
for all her support.

22
1

23
Latin American geographies
Gareth A. Jones

The principal question posed in this chapter is ‘where is Latin

America?’. At one level this is a simple geographical question
that should not vex anybody who has ever opened an atlas.
Indeed, compared to the frenzy of cartographic updates
necessary for Africa in the wake of decolonization or for
Eastern Europe after the Cold War, the maps of Latin
America appear to be fairly stable. A closer inspection would
reveal some contested borders, between Ecuador and Peru for
example, and some contested sovereignty, such as Las
Malvinas/the Falklands. At a different level, however, the
cartographic stability of Latin America is misleading. As
Harley has observed:

all maps, like all other historically constructed images, do

not provide a transparent window on the world. Rather
they are signs that present ‘a deceptive appearance of
naturalness and transparence concealing an opaque,
distorting, arbitrary mechanism of representation, a process
of ideological mystification’. (Harley 1992: 523, citing
Mitchell 1986)

Maps, then, are imagined representations of space just as

subjective as other ‘texts’ such as travel accounts, films,
paintings, surveys and exhibitions (Driver 1992). So, while in
the process of becoming objects these texts appear to convert
imagined geographies of Latin America into ‘real’

24
geographies, in this chapter I want to consider how all such
texts must still be understood as subjective. In order to do so I
want to suggest that Latin America needs to be understood as
geographically displaced through complex connections of
commodities, people and images (Tomlinson 1996). Latin
America is not contained in a collection of nation-states ‘over
there’ but is, increasingly, also ‘over here’. Latin America
might be a distinct place on a map, but its geography is
everywhere. Latin America has become de-territorialized.

IMAGINATIVE GEOGRAPHIES
Appadurai (1990) has usefully categorized these connections
of global cultural flows as ethnoscapes, mediascapes,
technoscapes, finanscapes and ideoscapes. Ethnoscapes
describe the persons who constitute the shifting world in
which we live: tourists, refugees, guestworkers and students
(1990: 297). In my classes at the London School of
Economics I have students from Argentina, Brazil, Chile,
Colombia, Mexico and Puerto Rico. I am implicated in an
intellectual globalization in which I am either ‘adding value’,
for an elite that can afford it, or encouraging a vicious ‘brain
drain’ of young talent from the region. On my journey home
across London, however, I encounter a different ethnoscape.
On the bus, generally on the upper floor, is a transnational
community of mostly Ecuadorians and Colombians. This is
also a brain drain, quite well educated and entrepreneurial
people now working as cleaners, porters and shop assistants
in central London. And at the weekend, the ethnoscape is
represented by a Latin American football league in a nearby
park and by salsa classes in a community hall.

25
A displaced Latin America is also encountered through a
technoscape of technology and information moving around
the world. This is baffling to my father, who emails to tell me
that his new up-and-over garage door is made in Hermosillo,
Mexico, although he seems unaware that his car was probably
made in Toluca and his computer in Tijuana. The
technoscape, however, is also delivering news about Latin
America’s engagement with the ideoscapes of world-views
such as democracy and rights. My email account in mid-2002
has recently been full of messages about the economic
collapse of Argentina, the attempted coup in Venezuela, and
environmental activist concerns about the Mexican
government’s decision to allow multinationals to grow
genetically modified grain.
Latin America is part of the finanscape in which a small part
of my mortgage depends upon the performance of ‘emerging’
stock markets. In this respect the technoscape of how those
branch plants on the US–Mexico border produce circuit
boards for my father’s computer and whether Venezuela’s
ambiguity towards democracy is affecting the price of oil
takes on a direct importance. To get away from it all, I
encounter Latin America in the mediascape, the image-based
narratives of what Appadurai calls ‘strips of reality’. For a
moment, I indulge myself with the Sunday newspapers
offering insights into snow boarding in the Andes and coral
reef diving off Belize, an interview with a ‘black’ Peruvian
singer about to tour Britain, a review of Argentine wines and
the latest Mario Vargas Llosa novel. Meanwhile, my
newsagent conveys to me his fears about the Latin
Americanization of crime as a local ‘drugs war’ to distribute
cocaine is fought by Jamaican Yardies and ‘Colombians’.

26
These are some of my connections to Latin America and they
instil in me a ‘map’ of what Latin America ‘must be’ like
which is not objectively arrived at
but reflects my cultural and political situatedness (Appadurai
1990: 296). My set of imaginative geographies, my multiple
ways of building a relationship to Latin America, are different
from those of a multinational corporation or an environmental
non-governmental organization (NGO), and differ according
to whether I am a cinema-goer, a drug-taker, a football fan or
a coffee-drinker. All imaginative geographies, however, are
constructed upon the reception, interpretation and retention of
discourses and images that represent Latin America as real.
To illustrate, I take two media that construct imaginative
geographies of Latin America. The first is the flow of images
and ideas about Latin America contained in nineteenth- and
early twentieth-century travel accounts, and which have
become established forms of knowledge through reproduction
in books, exhibitions, contemporary travel writing, as well as
a part of the ‘British’ cultural landscape, for example at the
Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew in London. A great deal
about what we think we know about Latin America today
derives from travel writers who nevertheless gave preference
to certain places and overlaid meanings onto landscapes
according to the ideological and philosophical conventions of
the day.
The second medium is the process of consumption,
specifically of bananas and coffee, the two principal
commodities from ‘tropical’ Latin America (Llambi 1994).
The inscription of imaginative geographies onto commodities
is by no means new. Sugar, spices, chocolate, even Fray
Bentos tinned beef have all been associated with

27
representations of Latin America and the Caribbean, and have
become domestic cultural icons at home (Naylor 2000;
Roseberry 1996). The construction of contemporary
imaginative geographies of Latin America through
consumption builds an image of Britain as cosmopolitan and
multicultural. But, while globalization is bringing Latin
America in one sense ever nearer, the imaginative
geographies represent Latin America in a series of
stereotypical ways so as to create distance and mark the
difference between the places of origin and the place of
consumption (Cook and Crang 1996; Smart 1994). Good taste
and chic may depend, briefly, on the consumption of an
image of Latin America as exotic, although to somebody else
the ‘gourmet’ coffee will be agribusiness.

TRAVEL WRITING AND

IMAGINATIVE GEOGRAPHIES
The shelves of any large bookshop reveal the importance of
the travel writing genre to the geographical imagination.
Today’s collection, however, pales compared to the
outpouring of travel accounts and works of natural history
during the nineteenth century that constituted perhaps as
much as 10 per cent of titles in libraries in England, Germany
and the USA (Cicerchia 1998). This enormous output was
written by ‘imperial citizens’ who were often directly
implicated in the scientific and political projects of empire.
The clearest
examples are the accounts emanating from official
expeditions, such as Charles Darwin’s The Voyage of the
Beagle, Robert Schomburgk’s survey of the Orinoco river and

28
Guyana borders, and La Condamine’s attempt to map the
Amazon (Burnett 2000; Dunbar 1988; Stepan 2001).1 Travel
accounts also emerged from involvement in surveying the
routes for rail companies, land colonization schemes and
diplomatic missions (Dickenson 1997; Naylor and Jones
1997; Pratt 1992; Walker 1992).
Many of these travel accounts are the precursors and
occasionally the more conscious guides to contemporary
travel writers.2 A good example is Toby Green’s Saddled
with Darwin, which recounts his attempt to follow the routes
taken by Darwin across South America to reveal how the
landscapes that were important to the study of evolution had
changed by the late 1990s. In places, Green’s attempts to
mimic Darwin’s journey on horseback prove impossible, cut
across by freeways or industrial zones, provoking Green to
wonder whether, had Darwin been travelling today, he would
have been able to make the kind of observations to generate a
theory of evolution. Darwin’s ghost serves as an accomplice
for Green’s critique of modern science, relating contemporary
landscapes to ideas of global warming and genetic theory.
Contemporary travel writing borrows from earlier accounts in
more subtle ways. Here I am interested in the appropriation of
representations established in the nineteenth-century writers’
narrative as a system of ‘truths’ (Cicerchia 1998).3 These
representations derive their (lasting) power from the
construction of objectivity by writers, who mostly lacked a
formal academic position, but whose class, race and gender
gave them the mandate to imagine themselves as
ethnographers, to pursue knowledge as a right and a symbol
of their status (Salvatore 1996).4 This kind of privilege
provided travellers with a detachment from the landscape that

29
allowed them to represent their subjective observations as
objective accounts.5 The opening to Reginald Koettlitz s
paper in the Scottish Geographical Magazine is fairly typical:

Having a wish to see this famous stream [the Amazon!] …

I took an opportunity offered me last April … Though the
opportunities for studying the people, especially the
Indians, as well as the natural history of northeastern
Brazil and the lower Amazon were very few, I propose to
give a short account of facts observed, together with
information gathered during the South American portion of
this voyage, in the hope that some of the matter may be of
interest to the members of the Scottish Geographical
Society, and some possibly even new. (Koettlitz 1901: 12)

Koettlitz does not mention the purpose of his trip to Brazil or

his legitimacy for disseminating his geographical
understanding, but he is sure that the ‘facts’ will be useful.
Koettlitz and others add to their credibility by giving the
impression of being ‘alone’. This device positions the travel
writer in a wilderness or against a frontier of the unknown,
and is particularly vital in Latin America where there
was little terra incognita and many preferred to follow
established routes linking a European presence (Dickenson
1997). Seeming ‘alone’, however, enhances the power of the
traveller to ‘see’ Latin America from a particular vantage
point. Koettlitz, for example, gazes upon the shore from a
boat, but for more drama travellers would look ‘down’ upon
the landscape, dominating the scene as the ‘master’ or
‘monarch’ of all they survey (Burnett 2000; Pratt 1992).6
Today, Latin America is viewed from trains or light aircraft,

30
or even from space using satellite imagery to ‘show’ global
warming.

Representations of Latin America

Detachment from and dominance over the landscape set up
the most important representation of Latin America, namely
the enormity of nature. According to Cicerchia, ever since
Humboldt’s thirty-volume travel accounts appeared in the
early nineteenth century, ‘part of the European imagery of the
“new continent” has been framed by nature’ (1998: 4). In his
Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of
the Americas (1814–25), von Humboldt fused aesthetic
appreciation with his tentative scientific understanding of
nature, raving about the ‘abundant fertility’ and ‘organic
richness’ (Arnold 2000). Writing to his brother, von
Humboldt commented in 1799:

What a fabulous and extravagant country we’re in!

Fantastic plants, electric eels, armadillos, monkeys,
parrots, and many, many, real half-savage Indians.

And Henry Bates wrote:

To the westward we could see a long line of forest rising

apparently out of the water; a densely packed mass of tall
trees, broken into groups, and finally into single trees, as it
dwindles away in the distance. This was the frontier, in this
direction, of the great primeval forest characteristic of this
region, which contains so many wonders in its recesses,
and clothes the whole surface of the country for two
thousand miles from this point to the foot of the Andes.
(Dickenson 1997: 112)

31
Unlike the pastoral or increasingly industrialized landscapes
of Europe, Latin American nature was physically
over-powering and abundantly fertile, a possible paradise or
Eden, adding a sexualized desire to the representation (Stepan
2001).
To the nineteenth-century traveller size did matter. It added to
the sublime, the awe that served to make the visualization of
the scene important, and captured an audience back home
(Martins 2000).7 Latin America was a region of giants –
usefully so in the case of Robert Schomburgk, whose
expedition to Guyana was saved by the discovery of a huge
water lily that he named after Queen Victoria, and which
became a centrepiece of the Great Exhibition of 1851
(Burnett 2000). More or less everyone makes some reference
to the
apparently endless sky-lines or the open landscape (Naylor
2001). Lady Florence Dixie was able to gallop and:

penetrate into vast wilds, virgin as yet to the foot of man.

Scenes of infinite beauty and grandeur might be lying
hidden in the silent solitude of the mountains which bound
the barren plains of the Pampas, into whose mysterious
recesses no one as yet had ever ventured. And I was to be
the first to behold them! (Across Patagonia, 1880, cited in
Robinson 1995)

Alone against the power of nature is a geographical

imagination that resonates with a contemporary distress at
environmental destruction (note Toby Green) and the
discourse of ‘eco-warriors’.
The representation of Latin America as a landscape
dominated by nature is frequently contrasted with

32
observations of poverty and disease to legitimate calls to
order nature. Dr David Christison, for example, writing of his
journey to the River Plate in 1866, describes how the
immense open grasslands gave Uruguay the potential to be ‘a
second Australia’. The point is illustrated by a drawing of an
unusual cloud formation rather like the trail of a jet plane
going from horizon to horizon underneath which the ‘wild
and picturesque’ gauchos drive cattle. The paper concludes
with a lament about the cornucopia going to waste such that
mutton that should be brought to ‘our use in these
overcrowded and pauper-stricken islands’ is just rotting
(Christison 1909: 481). As Pratt (1992) has argued, such
representations of Latin America as ‘nature’ were far from
innocent. In accounts that indicated the possibilities or
practice for improvement through rail or the introduction of
new crops, nature was converted into a resource – a
representation often supported by paintings and, later,
photographs showing rural and forest scenes cut into by
railways, roads, bridges (Matless 1992; Stepan 2001).
Travellers and scientists did not represent all forms of nature
as suitable to man-power. In the ‘tropics’ the dominance of
nature over man was portrayed as beyond the capacity of
science to tame (Arnold 2000). Albert Hale, for example, is
careful to point out that the region of the River Plate is ‘by no
means a tropical country’, noting how Buenos Aires and
Montevideo are on similar parallels and share the same
climate as Los Angeles and Cape Town, but he then notes that
‘only the extreme northern tip of the whole area is actually
between the Tropic of Capricorn and the Equator, and
therefore nearly every mile is susceptible of just such
productive activities as we, in the United States, understand
and have within broad limits put into practice’ (1909: 428–9).

33
By implication the area within the tropics was likely to be less
productive and unsuitable for improvement.
More broadly, however, the term tropical became a synonym
to denote a conceptual space where nature was magnificent,
Eden-like, dominant, but man was indolent and, in the
absence of science and civilization, vulnerable to flood,
hurricane, disease, and even rebellion. According to Arnold:

Although describing the tropics as ‘nature’s garden’ might

seem to suggest unqualified approval, in an age obsessed
with improvement and progress, with racial origins and
competitive evolution, there were definite disadvantages to
being the denizens of an earthly paradise. (2000: 10)

Travellers such as Henry Bates clearly preferred nature to the

population of Belém, whom he described in 1848 as idle
soldiers, slovenly dressed women, naked children and:

people of all shade of colour of skin, European, Negro, and

Indian, but chiefly of an uncertain mixture of the three …
So striking, in the view, was the mixture of natural riches
and human poverty … but amidst all, and compensating
every defect, rose the overpowering beauty of the
vegetation. (Naylor and Jones 1997: 103)

Over a half century later, Koettlitz describes travelling from

Para to Manaus on a steamboat dirty from the ‘filthy habits of
the people’, and he devotes more column inches to insects
and flora than to people, whom he rarely mentions other than
in relation to their race, conditions of disease/mortality and
laziness. Noting the uncared-for cocoa plantations, Koettlitz
writes that ‘the ordinary Brazilian loves laziness, and is so
indolent that he will rarely do a stroke more work than he is

34
compelled’ (1901: 23). And thirty years later again, Huxley
describes the villages of southern Mexico as stagnant places:

The spectacle, I confess, always made my blood run pretty

cold. Not so cold as the spectacle of an industrial town in
Lancashire, say, or the Ruhr (that has power to chill the
heart of man to its absolute zero); but cold, heaven knows,
enough. The industrial town is intensely and positively,
whereas these Mexican places are only negatively,
appalling. They are appalling not so much because of what
is there as because of what isn’t there. A Black Country
town is a fearful sin of commission; Miahuatlan and its
kind are sins of omission. Omission of the mental and the
spiritual, of all that is not day-to-day animal living. ‘Lilies
that fester smell far worse than weeds’; the Black Country
is more horrible than Miahuatlan because it embodies the
corruption of a higher good than has ever been aimed at, at
any rate since the fall of the indigenous empires, by the
Indians. (1934: 146–7)

These representations of people in the tropics as backward,

lazy, as well as temperamental and prone to sexual
ill-discipline, found an echo in ‘science’ which mapped them
onto race/climate (Livingstone 1999). This same literature,
however, also showed how climate and disease served against
the ability of a ‘white’ population to work in the tropics.
Better, therefore, to manage the locals or, as was observed
during the construction of the Panama Canal, encourage
labour migration from Spain (but also Italy, Ireland and
Eastern Europe), as these workers were more productive than
either the North Americans doing lighter work or the
‘Negroes’ (Matless 1992). The paradox

35
serves to the present day. Left to its own devices tropical
Latin America is incapable of development, necessitating
external assistance, while those from outside consider
themselves unsuited to work under the same conditions.
Representations of ‘man-power’ in the tropics stand in
counterpoint to the depictions of indigenous peoples. First, as
already illustrated by Lady Florence Dixie’s gallop across
Patagonia, indigenous peoples were often absented entirely.
Second, they served as additions to a picturesque landscape
by encroaching onto riverbanks or a village nestled against
foothills. Third, indigenous peoples were represented within a
framework of human improvement. Had indigenous societies
degenerated from a more advanced civilization? Had they
‘become’ savages and primitives? It is a representation
contemplated by Huxley:

Indian men are often handsome; but I hardly ever saw a

woman or young girl who was not extremely ugly.
Endemic goitre does not improve their native homeliness;
and without exaggeration, I should guess that at least a
third of the women of Chichicastenango [Guatemala] have
bulging necks. One would expect to find cretins in a
population so much afflicted with goitre. But I never saw a
single one. Doubtless they are born, but fail, in the
unmerciful environment of an Indian rancho, to survive.
(1934: 103)

Fourth, indigenous people were seen as the objects of science.

While some travellers, such as Henry Bates, Alfred Wallace
and Richard Spruce, sought to map the diversity of language
and indigenous uses of nature to pose a dynamic
understanding of their existence, the dominant representation

36
was established by von Humboldt, who often treated
vegetation and indigenous artefacts in the same taxonomical
framework (Barreto and Machado 2001). This framework
placed indigenous people and objects in the same form as
natural specimens, showing similar objects next to one
another even when originating from different ethnic groups
thousands of miles apart. This Linnaean model, as it is
technically called, is still used in museum display but it is
being challenged by exhibitions such as the Unknown Amazon
at the British Museum, which shows the complexity of
indigenous societies and how they use the environment
productively (see www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk).
While nature was represented as a sublime populated by
‘innocents’, most cities in Latin America were represented
rather differently. Marianne North’s paintings of Rio de
Janeiro show the Corcovado mountain as a scenic backdrop
but one could be forgiven for thinking that a city was not
remotely near. Charles Fox-Banbury described settlements in
Brazil as monotonous, except for the occasional church, and
inhabited by ‘ugly and scantily clad negresses’ and ‘an
abundance of layabouts’ (Dickenson 1997). When cities had
to be entered, Salvatore (1996) argues that travellers sought
out the marks of civilization, checking the quality of the
museums, libraries, hospitals and prisons. In this vein
Koettlitz describes parts of Para as having some ‘handsome
and imposing edifices’ built with stone from Europe and
‘several small public
gardens and fine plazas’, although George Fracker deplored
1820s’ Buenos Aires, commenting that ‘the theatre is a low
and miserable building … and the performances are in
keeping with it’ (Cicerchia 1998: 15). According to Salvatore
(1996), some writers gave impressionistic accounts of the

37
social landscape of cities, describing the bustle of the streets
and shortcomings in local manners. The main features of the
urban landscape therefore were often described in relation to
the standards of Europe, while the slums or more mundane
parts of the city were ignored.
Comparison is a powerful form of representation. Through
evoking landscapes, institutions and peoples back home,
writers could make the diverse and strange intelligible to their
audience (Naylor and Jones 1997; Salvatore 1996), while also
making little attempt to hide their preference. Thus, Saussure
compared tropical nature in Mexico unfavourably to that of
his native Switzerland (Dunbar 1988), Charles Fox-Banbury
compared the better parts of Minas Gerais to
Caernarvonshire, and Marianne North compared the Rio de
Velhas to the River Tweed except that the former was ‘a bit
more tropical’ (Dickenson 1997). The urban landscape too
was compared to home. Luther Schaeffer compared the
Emperor’s chapel in Rio de Janeiro to the Boston Exchange,
and Nathaniel Bishop compared the Buenos Aires jail to
reformatories in the USA (Salvatore 1996: 105). More
abstractly, Aldous Huxley compared the church at San Felipe
in Guatemala to Keble chapel, Oxford, and the Preparatoria in
Mexico City as ‘most refreshingly’ unlike Rugby or Roedean
public schools. Sometimes comparison represented a joint
distaste. Huxley again:

We lunched at Quezaltenango in a most forbidding

German hotel. Pretentious, dirt, expense – one was
painfully reminded of inedible lunches in South Shields, of
a weekend in Middlesbrough, with a dark tide-mark of grit
and the pubic hairs of commercial travellers running round
the bath. (1934: 116)

38
Comparison also extended to ideologies, folklore and political
condition. Travellers from the USA compared the life of
blacks in South America to those in the American South
(Salvatore 1996). Others, more esoterically, compared the
religious idolatry of the Maya to that of the Romans, political
populism to Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini, and social and
philosophical contexts to the civilizations of Egypt, India,
Greece and Babylonia (Huxley 1934; Naylor and Jones
1997).
Travel writing on Latin America created a series of
stereotypes that represented both the human and the physical
landscape as different from those of Europe or North
America. While Latin America was not seen as the antithesis
of Europe – compared to Africa for example, the people could
not be easily grouped as ‘natives’ or ‘barbarians’ – it was
imagined to be less productive, less civilized or more natural,
more dangerous. This imagined geography of other places
was useful to the constitution of economic, political
and cultural imaginations about how Europeans and North
Americans saw themselves. The ‘others’ were regarded as
inferior and therefore in need of authority and science.

Representations of Latin America as ‘British’

culture
I suspect that few people have read Darwin’s The Voyage of
the Beagle, Burton’s Explorations of the Highlands of Brazil,
Wallace’s A Narrative of Travels on the Amazon and Rio
Negro, or any of the hundreds more narratives like them. Yet,
we may be familiar with the imagined geographies of Latin
America, in part because representations of ‘other places’ are
a staple part of the Western cultural landscape. In Britain, for

39
example, London is littered with sites that display Latin
America, from the Victoria and Albert Museum, to the
Natural History and British Museums, London Zoo, even
Harrods. Outside, some of the ‘great’ country houses that
serve as settings for novels-to-film and are managed by
English Heritage were built with proceeds from the slave
trade or sugar plantations (Seymour et al. 1998).
Through re-representation these sites celebrate and confirm a
particular geographical imagination of Latin America. They
operate as a form of ‘information technology’ by organizing,
deleting and interpreting scattered objects brought back from
travel and (scientific) exploration (Richards 1993). Today’s
exhibitions might not include ‘real’ Indians in this exercise
(Anthropology Day at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase
Exposition displayed ‘Patagonians’ to demonstrate the virtues
of health and exercise on the body of ‘primitives’), but most
exhibitions remain based on Euro/US-centric ideas of
‘universal values’ in which the curators decide what is worth
collecting, thereby dividing the world into the ‘curating
cultures’ and the ‘curated cultures’ (Mosquera 1994: 135).
We can appreciate this power of re-representation of Latin
America by thinking about the botanical gardens. As Martins
(2000) observes, the botanical garden was already an
established part of the landscape of Europe by the early
nineteenth century and many travellers’ first experience of
‘tropical nature’, including Charles Darwin’s, was an
encounter in these tamed surroundings. Botanical gardens are
marvels of order in which plants that exist in nature in
seemingly chaotic display – the ‘abundant fertility’ of von
Humboldt – are placed inside hothouses, set out in
taxonomical clusters in which orchids from Brazil could sit

40
among palms from Sri Lanka, and are given Latin names and
scientific explanation (Stepan 2001).
The botanical garden, therefore, domesticates other places by
putting their plants into our framework of reference. At the
Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, Latin America becomes
part of Western, or more specifically British, culture, and not
only because of the tropical plants within the famous
glasshouses. If one walks along the eastern edge of the
gardens one passes a Victorian villa complete with wrought
iron balcony and a slightly incongruous
pediment. This is the Marianne North Gallery, opened in
1882 to house the 500 or so paintings of flora and fauna from
over a dozen countries including Jamaica, Brazil and Chile.
The gallery is a marvel of travel, science and imperial power.
Inside, overhead in gold letters, are the names of the countries
or regions that are the subject of the paintings beneath. The
gallery is testament to how a single middle-aged Victorian
woman could travel across the world, aided by private wealth
and the support of company agents, virtually without
hindrance in the scientific endeavour of painting and botany
(then, usually no more than a lady’s hobby) (Losano 1997).8
The gallery and the paintings exhibit some of the
representations of Latin America that dominate the
contemporary geographical imagination. Within the gallery
hardly an inch of wall is blank, giving the feeling of nature’s
power. Furthermore, in the paintings themselves North
positioned the plants as the foreground, again reinforcing the
dominance of nature and accentuating what Stepan (2001)
notes is the flowers’ exotic presence. While the subject is
presented as the foreground, it is also displaced. Through the
order of the gallery and the incredible attention to detail

41
(some paintings show little more than the fine points of a
single plant stem), North gives the impression that these
‘exact’ representations are already in a European botanical
garden. Certainly, they are not touched by the dirty hands of
imperialism, a representation reinforced by North’s minimal
use of background, sometimes no more than a misty mountain
or lake, that conveys almost no human presence whatsoever.
Throughout, human scale is dwarfed by nature, the ‘enormous
vivid flowers, itty bitty grey people’ (Losano 1997: 433).
Indeed, in her memoirs North provides thick descriptions of
nature but the few people get short shrift, including herself –
against the solitude of nature, North is working alone (Losano
1997; North 1993). Just like the gardens outside, the scene at
the gallery is quintessentially British, the landscape style
European, their content Latin America, Africa or India.9

CONSUMPTION AND
IMAGINATIVE GEOGRAPHIES
My second illustration of imaginative geographies of Latin
America seems far removed from travel writing and paintings
at Kew Gardens. However, just as books, paintings and
botanical specimens brought images of Latin America into
many homes during the nineteenth century, so the
globalization of agro-food is drawing Latin America into our
daily world. A tour of my local supermarket revealed
asparagus, avocados and strawberries from Mexico, mangoes
from Peru, honey from Guatemala, melons from Panama, paw
paw from Costa Rica, flowers from Colombia, grapes from
Chile, plus processed products such as tortillas and sauces,
wines from Argentina and Chile, and beers from Mexico.

42
We can understand the presence of these commodities on our
shelves in a number of ways. One argument is that they form
part of a new international food space economy supported by
global institutions and enabled by dramatic changes to the
division of labour and technology (Andreatta 1998; Friedland
1994; Gwynne 1999; Murray 1998; but see Goodman and
Watts 1994). Consumers in the North are presented with an
increasingly wide selection of commodities regardless of
season and presented as ‘fresh’ despite long transport
distances from their place of origin (Friedland 1994; Gwynne
1999). Behind these scenes this economy has adopted
industrial techniques of ‘just in time’ production and
aggressive social policies such as anti-unionization, and
encouraged the feminization of labour at both the point of
production (fruit packing in Chile) and consumption
(supermarket shelf filling in Britain) (Barrientos and Perrons
1999; Murray 1998; Raynolds 1998).
A second argument understands the international food space
economy through the representation of commodities rather
than purely economic relations between producers and
consumers. As Cook (1994) argues, supermarket trading
managers have been active in constructing meanings for
particular new fruits and especially ‘exotics’ (what they used
to call ‘queer gear’) through advertising campaigns and
placement on cookery programmes that associate them with
particular social classes, ‘healthy’ lifestyles, and sexuality. To
some extent these representations are a response to economic
and political change. In 2000, the Banana Protocol that gave
preferential treatment to bananas imported into the European
Union from former colonies in the Caribbean collapsed after a
challenge at the World Trade Organization by Ecuador,
Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico. Their argument was that

43
the Protocol contravened the principles of free trade and was
obliging European consumers to pay an additional $US 2
billion per annum (only $US 150 million of which reached
the farmer, most being retained by shippers and distributors)
(The Economist, 10 April 1999). Yet, bananas from the
Caribbean are still available in my supermarket and they still
cost more than the larger varieties from Ecuador. But they are
now explicitly labelled as from the Windward Islands, and are
advertised as smaller, sweeter and more environmentally
friendly. Managers are now representing these as specifically
‘Caribbean’ bananas.
Am I making better-informed consumption decisions when I
purchase my ‘Caribbean’ as opposed to ‘Latin American’
bananas or am I buying into an imaginative geography? This
imaginative geography presents me with a fairly remunerated
smallholder in the Caribbean compared to large plantations in
South and Central America using temporary, possibly child,
labour and stuck in an unfair contract with a multinational
company (Human Rights Watch 2002). Of course, really, I
have no idea how much of the extra price paid for
‘Caribbean’ bananas makes its way back to the smallholder,
and whether it is paying for better labour standards or a
mismanagement of local eco-systems that make larger-scale
production difficult (Andreatta 1998). To what extent
am I being duped by an imaginative geography into thinking
that I am exerting my agency as a consumer?

Representations of Latin America in a coffee

cup
The conventional understanding of consumer-product
relations has stressed what Marx called commodity fetishism.

44
This illustrated how consumers are kept ignorant of the
exploitation or violations of human rights that take place in
the process of getting an item to the store (Harvey 1990).
Commodity fetishism allows consumers to think of their
purchases as moral actions. Yet, commodity fetishism is
constantly being exposed. Aldous Huxley, visiting a coffee
estate in highland Guatemala during the 1930s, noted how
‘“the cups that cheer but not inebriate” require the use of
children to raise the productivity of the only paid worker and
that to pay such “sweated coloured” labour European wages
would raise costs to the consumer by eight or ten times’
(1934: 140).
Appadurai (1990), however, suggests that Marx’s commodity
fetishism has been replaced by what he calls production
fetishism and the fetishism of the consumer. According to
Appadurai, production fetishism is the illusion that
transnational production is not about placeless capital, global
management and faraway workers, but a spectacle of idyllic
local industries and of national sovereignty. Rather than hide
links back to production, therefore, some retailers represent
their ‘direct’ link to the grower in the field into a corporate
boast, claiming that this way they can ensure the quality of
the product, which is good news for the company, the grower
and the consumer. Describing the image of Guatemalan
plantations contained in a Starbucks’ brochure, Michael
Smith (1996) notes how these are depicted as peaceful places
of honest toil, operated as small family farms, in which the
buyer and the grower are ‘friends’. It is a representation
extended by Starbucks’ glossy Corporate Responsibility
Annual Report, which gives details of support for NGOs to
undertake social projects related to health and literacy in
coffee-producing areas and of encouragement to producers to

45
adopt environmentally sustainable practices overseen by
organizations such as Conservation International (Starbucks
2002).
Of course, a harder look at the international coffee market
does not fully support this benevolent representation.
According to Fitter and Kaplinsky (2001), only about 40 per
cent of the pre-consumption price of coffee (i.e. the price
before it reaches the coffee shop) accrues to the country of
origin and, at best, only about 10 per cent is received by the
farmer (also Renard 1999). Moreover, world coffee prices
have declined from over $US 3 per pound in the early 1970s
to below 50 cents in 2001 due to both the substitution of
supply from countries such as Vietnam where labour costs
and environmental regulations are low and the collapse of the
International Coffee Agreement in 1989 which had attempted
to sustain price agreements among major producer nations
(Llambi 1994; Roseberry 1996). Despite a modest increase in
the size
of the global coffee market (which grew by between 1 and 2.6
per cent per annum during the 1990s), the small family-run
farms have been badly hit.
How do these conditions tally with the explosion of coffee
bars on the high street as well as the range of coffees that they
sell? A recent article in the Guardian Weekend reported that
in a ten-minute walk from Charing Cross station along The
Strand in London, one would pass two Starbucks, three
Coffee Republic, two Caffe Nero and two Costa coffee shops
(14 August 2001). Given that, in 2002, Starbucks is opening
six new shops per month in Britain, Costa is opening four and
McDonald’s is planning to follow up its control of Aroma
with the introduction of a McCafé chain, these figures are

46
likely to be significantly out of date by the time this chapter
goes to press. This rapid growth in places selling ‘gourmet’
coffee in Britain follows a trend in the USA where coffee
consumption rose from $US 13.5 billion in 1993, of which
less than $US 1 billion was in gourmet coffees, to $US 18
billion in 1999, of which $US 7.5 billion was in gourmet
(Roseberry 1996; Starbucks 2002). Although Starbucks does
pay over the global market rate for coffee, and especially for
organic and shade-grown varieties, it has also benefited from
the decline in prices generally, new technology and
deregulation in producer companies. All of this suggests that
my ‘tall’ cappuccino should become cheaper over time. One
reason why the price seems resilient to the market is that only
about 4 per cent of the price of a ‘gourmet’ coffee is actually
coffee (Fitter and Kaplinsky 2001). So what am I paying for?
Part of the explanation might lie with Appadurai’s second
concept, the fetishism of the consumer, in which an image is
created for consumers to believe that they are agents in the
flow of commodities rather than just ‘choosers’. Appadurai,
however, is rather vague as to how images that pretend to
empower the consumer are constructed. One insight into the
relationship between consumers, commodities, and the
construction of knowledge is through work on the notion of
‘taste’ (May 1996; Smart 1994). For consumers, and perhaps
especially those from the ‘new cultural class’ of young
professionals, it is increasingly important to invest symbolic
meanings into commodities and the surroundings in which
they are consumed in order to signify their social distinction
from others. One particular symbolic meaning is ‘exotic’,
which projects the consumer as cosmopolitan, travelled,
multicultural, upwardly mobile. ‘Exotic’ draws the consumer

47
directly into an imaginative geography that consciously plays
on a relationship with the Third World.
A good example is provided by Paul Smith (1989), who
shows how the clothing chain Banana Republic Travel and
Safari Clothing Company is comfortable appropriating
images that play on the exotic. Indeed, the company
consciously conveys cliché images of political instability in
Central America (in which no one is killed), the racist
language of colonialism and the re-representation of travel
narratives in catalogues, likening shopping to a safari. Smith
quotes the founders explaining the origin of the Banana
Republic name:

because our merchandise came from countries where one

regime had deposed another and declared all the old
uniforms surplus. The new general could never be seen in
the old general’s uniform … and [it was] part of a whimsy
of creating an imaginary republic where I was Minister of
Propaganda and Finance and Patricia was Minister of
Culture. (Smith 1989: 130)

Rather than deny the relationship between the company and

the Third World, Banana Republic is building imaginative
geographies of what the place of origin for their goods might
be like.
The extent to which consumers are implicated in the
construction of the ‘exotic’ through particular geographical
imaginations needs further understanding. According to Cook
and Crang (1996), we can consider three ways in which
geographical imaginations interact with consumption. First,
the ‘setting’ or where one eats is important to the signals of
status and taste. The ‘setting’ for the consumption of gourmet

48
coffee is modern stylized surroundings that offer a West
Coast USA-meets-European coffee house environment,
open-plan design with sofas and small tables to encourage
social interaction, and floor-to-ceiling glass frontages and
outward facing stools to see the street, and be seen from it (M.
D. Smith 1996). These restaurants and bars are also
associated with sites of gentrification. Indeed, Starbucks
makes a virtue of this relationship, claiming that ‘a new
Starbucks is evidence the area is ripe for redevelopment. It’s
yet another step in the right direction’ (Starbucks 2002: 14).10
There is also, however, a less tangible notion of ‘setting’. At a
Starbucks in Washington DC I picked up the ‘mission
statement’ that claimed the ‘guiding principle’ of the
company was to ‘contribute positively to our communities
and our environment’. In practice this contribution seemed to
mean ‘putting in many hours of volunteer time for our local
neighborhoods and non-profit groups’, the donation of old
pastries and past-date coffee, the formation of ‘Green Teams’
to organize litter pickups, and support for community
projects. All of these are worthwhile acts, but they also create
the belief that consumers are not buying coffee from a
faceless multinational but from a locally in-touch retailer.
The second interaction of geographical imagination and
consumption works by creating ‘biographies’ of how a
commodity arrived in the store or dinner table. The biography
may involve a play on distance, on how the materials were
brought from afar for just this drink or meal. Again, I can
illustrate with a leaflet picked up at a Starbucks in central
London called The Story of Good Coffee: Whole Bean Coffee.
This describes the process by which the bean is bought,
roasted and served. In addition to the obvious attention to the

49
flavour and freshness, the leaflet tells a story involving only
two principal actors: the buyer for Starbucks and the baristas
who are ‘trained professionals dedicated to helping you find
your perfect cup’. Working together, this team is
willing to go to ‘extreme’ lengths. In the biography, however,
nobody seems to grow the coffee bean which is purchased on
the unlikely assertion of ‘taste alone, regardless of price’.
The third interaction is the identification of ‘origins’. This
geographical imagination has been fundamental to wine
consumption for a long time, where consumers (are asked to)
associate drinking with a particular valley in Chile. In the
case of coffee, retailers have trained the consumer to
appreciate origins by, for example, the use of ‘maps’. One
map is on Starbucks’ website, which offers consumers the
opportunity to ‘Taste the Sights’ through ‘World Coffee
Tours’ by receiving every eight weeks a selection of ‘exotic’
coffees from around the world. A narrative style map is
Starbucks’ leaflet The World of Coffee: In Search of the Best
Beans, which guides the consumer to coffee-producing areas,
noting how climate, altitude and soil affect the quality of the
bean. This map works by conflating places into ‘coffee
regions’ such as Arabia or Central America, while presenting
others, such as Costa Rica, as outside these regions in order to
accentuate the distinction of their coffees (M. D. Smith 1996:
515). Even greater imagination is at work when Yukon Blend,
symbolized by a grizzly bear, is described as made from the
‘brisk qualities of Latin American coffees [and] the heaviness
of a select Indonesian coffee’. Harmless fun? Or does the
‘exotic’ rely upon imaginative geographies of race (May
1996)? It is notable that coffee, place and people become
interchangeable through terms such as ‘wild’, ‘mysterious’,
‘sun-blasted’, ‘chocolatey’, ‘spicy’, or sexualized as

50
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
 We had not journeyed far beyond Lincoln Park before we
approached the State Asylum for the Acute Insane. From the
beginning of my pilgrimage, I had kept a sharp lookout for Insane
Asylums, always passing them after dark, but Mac argued that the
public had by this time found me harmless, and advised me to call.
So I did.
"A patient has arrived," some one called to an attendant. I was
startled, but soon recovered my equilibrium, when I observed several
doctors and nurses rush out of doors to a carriage at the porch. The
lunatic having been safely deposited in one of the wards, the
Superintendent then welcomed me, and persuaded me to accept his
invitation to visit and inspect the institution.
There was only one department that interested me. I had no
sooner entered the kitchen than my omnivorous eye caught the pie-
ocine stratum of a well-developed pie, and my curiosity led me to
inquire if it were made by a lunatic.
"Why, most certainly, Professor!" exclaimed the Superintendent.
"What's the matter with it?"
"As far as appearances go, I think it's all right—doesn't look
different from any other pie I've seen and eaten. Shouldn't think a
crazy man could make a decent pie, though; did he do it all alone,
without anybody watching him?"
"Oh no, we employ a sane cook to supervise the cooking,"
explained the officer, much to my satisfaction. "Will you have a
piece?" he asked.
"Y-y-y-y-yes," I said incredulously, "if you are sure there is no
danger of insanity being transferred to me by such a delectable
agency."
The head cook then butchered the great pie into quarters, and the
Superintendent said, "Help yourself, boys."
I gathered up the juicy quarter, and saying, "My good sir, you
have heard of dog eat dog, you shall now witness Pye eat pie." I
proceeded to devour it. I couldn't recollect ever having eaten better
pie; I was almost prompted to ask the cook to slaughter another, but,
instead, carried the remaining quarter out to Mac A'Rony.
 When we had left the asylum, I could not help but remark the
scrutiny with which each man regarded the other.
At length we went into camp near a farm house, where we
certainly acquitted ourselves in a manner to arouse the suspicions of
any sane observer. We put our sleeping-bag on the ground outside of
the tent, built a fire close to the tent on the windward side while a
strong breeze was blowing, cooked creamed potatoes in the coffee
pot, and steeped tea in the frying pan; and Coonskin tied all three
donkeys and the dog to a small sapling by their tails. I felt sure that
insanity was breaking out in our party in an aggravated form, and
congratulated Cheese, Damfino and Don for not having eaten
infected pie.
Camp Lunatic, as we called it was visited by the owner of the
farm, a hospitable German, who had a large family. He gave us a
generous donation of corn-cobs for fuel, milk, butter, fresh eggs, and
water, then introduced his wife and children. I asked him how he
came to have such a large family. He explained that he had a large
farm and couldn't afford hired help, and he thought the best way to
remedy the difficulty was to rear boys to help him. He looked
hopeful, although he had eight girls, no boys.
Supper over, the farmer conferred on me every possible honor,
even letting me hold his youngest girl, a child of ten months. He said,
enthusiastically, he was going to name his boy after me; the wife
smiled heroically.
To cap the climax, I was asked to write my name in the big family
Bible. The book was in German. My host opened it to a blank page,
and, without comment, I inscribed my name underneath the
strangely printed heading—Gestorben, thus pleasing the whole
family.
When we reached our tent, Barley began to find fault with me.
"What for did yuse want to write your name on de Gestorben page?"
he asked seriously. "Dat means bad luck, dat does."
"And why?" I inquired, puzzled.
"Gestorben is German and means death, yuse crazy loon!" he
returned. "It's de lunatic pie dat's workin' already; wese all goin'
crazy."
 Next day was hot. In the afternoon my party rested three hours in
the shade of a peach orchard, where we were treated to ice cream by
the kind lady of the house close by. It was about 105 miles from
Lincoln to Hastings, and we covered it in five days.
Threading the villages of Exeter, Crete, Friend, and Dorchester,
we arrived in Grafton, where I caught my courier in a dishonest trick,
and discharged him.
The party reached Hastings Thursday, June 17, where I
purchased a saddle for Coonskin. Detained by a thunderstorm, we
passed a miserable night in close quarters. Next morning, Mac
pranced about like a circus donkey, and trailed to Kearney in a
manner almost to wind his fellows.
Before leaving Hastings, the Superintendent of the Asylum for the
Chronic Insane, three miles out of town, telephoned me to stop and
dine with him. On this occasion I rode into the asylum grounds
without hesitation or nervousness.
"You must earn your grub, according to contract, Professor," said
the Superintendent, when the greetings were over, pointing to a
wood-pile in the rear of the building. As soon as I fairly began to
comply with the suggestion his young lady secretary, the daughter of
a deceased and much esteemed congressman, trained a camera on
me and the axe and secured a picture.
I was then notified I had more than earned my dinner, and was
escorted into the family dining-room, where an enjoyable repast was
accorded me, after which, some twenty wardens and matrons
purchased photos at double price. Then I resumed the journey with
more heartfelt blessings than had been expressed to me on similar
occasions.
The trail was superb. But an intensely hot spell followed, and
made all of us perspire. Two days of hard travel brought us to the old
Government Reservation of Ft. Kearney, established by Gen.
Fremont on his historic overland trip to California in pioneer days.
The fort has long since been abandoned. There the Mormons
camped for a short period after leaving Council Bluffs.
Next evening, I made my camp on the site of the notorious Dirty
Woman's Ranch of early days, and spent a Sunday in delightful rest
and recreation in the shade of the grove of wide-spreading elms and
cotton-woods that sighed mournfully over the deserted scene.

larger

A. "Trail through the timber."

B. "He had caught a nice mess."
C. "Climbing Pike's Peak."

We crossed the long, low bridge over the Platte, early in the
morning. It required nearly an hour and all our wits and energies to
get the donkeys across, even after blindfolding them. And when my
party ambled into Kearney, that sultry, dusty June day, grimy with
dirt and perspiring, we all were in ripe condition for a swim. The
little city looked to be about the size of Hastings, but did not show
the same enterprise and thrift. In fact, the inhabitants ventured out
in the broiling sun with an excusable lack of animation, and seemer
to show no more interest in their local affairs than they did in Pye
Pod's pilgrimage. It was here I first saw worn the Japanese straw
helmet. It served as a most comfortable and effective sun-shade, and
purchasing a couple, we donned them at once.
Kearney is said to be the half-way point, by rail, between New
York and San Francisco. My diary, however, showed I had covered
fully two thousand miles of my overland journey; I had consumed
227 days, with only one hundred and thirty-four days left me, the
prospects of accomplishing the "feat" in schedule time looked
dubious enough.
The great Watson Ranch, when my donkey party arrived, was
experiencing its busiest season. But, while the male representatives
were in the fields, the good matron in charge of the house made us
welcome and treated us to cheering bowls of bread and milk. When
Mr. Watson, Jr., arrived, he showed us about the place and
enlightened me about alfalfa, of which he had over a thousand acres
sown; fifty hired hands were busy harvesting it.
For a week or two we had, for the most part, been trailing through
the perfumed prairies at an invigorating altitude ranging from two
thousand to nearly three thousand feet, inhaling the fresh, pure air,
gazing on the flower-carpeted earth, and enjoying a constant shifting
of panoramic scenes of browsing herds, and bevies of birds, and
occasional glimpses of the winding Platte and the sand dunes
beyond.
The cities and villages, that formed knots in the thread of our
travels on the plains, came into view like the incoming ships from the
sea. At first one spied a white church-steeple in the distance like a
pointed stake in the earth only a mile away, but soon the chimneys
and roofs and finally door-yard fences would come into view, then
what we thought a village, nearby, proved to be, as we journeyed
onward, a town of much greater size seven or eight miles beyond the
point of calculation. The crossbars on the telegraph poles, along the
straight and level tracks of the Union Pacific, formed in the eye's dim
perspective a needle, as they seemed to meet with the rails on the
horizon. Little bunches of trees, scattered miles apart and then
overtopped by the spinning wheel of an air motor, indicated the site
of a ranch-house where we might procure water. The trail ahead
became lost in a sea of flowers and grasses.
From time to time, as I dismounted to ease myself and little steed
I picked from the stirrups a half dozen kinds of flowers, ensnared as
my feet brushed through the grasses. Great beds of blood-red
marshmallows; natural parterres of the wax-like blooms of the
prickly pear; scattering stems of the flowery thistle with white
corollas as large as tulips; and wild roses and daisies of all shades
and colors—the white and pink, and the white wild roses being the
first I ever saw; these with varicolored flowers of all descriptions
were woven into the prairie grasses and likened the far-reaching
plain to a great Wilton carpet enrolled from the mesa to the river.
Some of the sunsets were gorgeous. At times, the western sky
glowed like a prairie fire; and the sunrises were not less magnificent.
Sometimes, we were overtaken by severe electric storms, and obliged
to pitch the tent in a hurry. When the lightning illuminates the plains
at night, the trees and the distant towns are brought into fantastic
relief against the darkness, like the shifting pictures of a
stereopticon.
A flash of lightning to the right reveals a church or school-house,
to the left, a bunch of cattle chewing the cud or grazing, ahead of us,
a ranch house, and, sometimes, to the rear, a pack of cowardly
coyotes, at a safe distance, either following my caravan, or out on a
forage hunt.
Often, as the trains swept by, the engineers would salute with a
deafening blast of whistles, frightening the donkeys and entertaining
the passengers. Some of the prairie towns which look large on the
map have entirely disappeared. In one case, I found more dead
citizens in the cemetery than live ones in the village. Frequently, as a
means of diversion, I left the saddle to visit these white-chimney
villages of the dead. Such might be considered a grave sort of
amusement, but really some of the gravestones contained interesting
epitaphs. In one instance the following caught my eye:
"God saw best from us to sever
Darling Michael, whom we love;
He has gone from us forever,
To the happy realms above."

Imagine the shock to my sobered senses on reading these lines

cut on a white-washed wooden slab, close by:
"Here lays Ezekiel Dolder,
Who died from a jolt in the shoulder;
He tried to shoot snipe
While lighting his pipe,
And now underneath his bones moulder."

Just below the heartrending epitaph appeared in bold letters the

satisfactory statement—"This monument is pade fer."
On the lonely plains, miles from habitation, a single grave fenced
in with barbed wire in a circular corral, I discovered a mate to the
preceding epitaph, which illustrates the utter abandon with which
the rugged, dashing "bronco buster" regards the perils of riding a
bucking wild horse.
"Here is buried my bronco, Ah Sam,
Beside me—I don't give a damn!
While bucking he killed me;
On this spot he spilled me,
And now the devil's I am."

Sometime before parting with my courier, unknown to him we

pitched camp one dark night in a graveyard. Barley was an early
riser, and, as we know, as superstitious as he was gullible. He was the
first out of the tent at dawn. Suddenly he rushed back, exclaiming:
"De Resurrection has came, fellows, an' wese de first livin' on earth
agin." And with terror in his eyes and voice, dragged Coonskin and
me to see a strange sight indeed. There, some forty feet from the tent,
stood a towering crucifix with a figure of the Saviour, life size,
looking down upon us, while about us were tablets and mounds: the
scene was so still and solemn no wonder that my awestricken courier
thought the world had come to an end.
On the 24th of June, after a hot and dusty trail across an arid
waste, where only occasional patches of buffalo grass and cacti
matted the earth in the place of the long prairie grass and flowers we
were tramping in a few days before, my weary troop, jaded and
hungry entered the little village of Overton.
 CHAPTER XXXI.
Narrow escape in quicksand TOC

BY MAC A'RONY.
And the ass turned out of the way, and went into the field; and Balaam smote
the ass, to turn her into the way.—Book of Numbers.

Shortly after reaching Overton, I took Pod with Coonskin and

Don to pay our respects to Towserville, a large dog town so closely
situated to Overton as to inspire a rivalry far more serious than that
existing between Minneapolis and St. Paul. Overtonians complained
of repeated raids made by prairie dogs of Towserville on their
chickens and gardens. On the other hand, the Towser "villians"
repudiated the calumny, then fled in confusion from the charge of
shotguns and rifles.
As our party approached with guns trained for a complimentary
salute, I saw his honor, the Mayor, seated in his hallway. The roof of
his mound towered above the other habitations, and was
undoubtedly the City Hall. Copying after New York, each burrow in
Towserville had a representative in the City Council.
I'm sure we would have been welcomed cordially, had not Don
wanted to be first to shake the Mayor's paw; his honor abruptly
excused himself to avoid a scene, and his fellow townsdogs likewise,
with the result that the above dogtown population rushed in and
slammed the doors in our faces. The Professor was embarrassed. He
had no visiting cards, so decided to leave at each door a sample box
of cathartic pills; and a careful distribution was made.
Next morning as we passed Towserville, his dogcellency, the
Mayor, his alderdogs and towndogs looked regretful of their slight to
us, as each stood at his door or sat with his housekeeper, the owl, on
the roof of his dwelling, nodding and waving at us. Others, however,
were prostrate, either from remorse or Pod's magnanimity.
Sometime about noon, we approached the shallow current of the
Platte, where we were unpacked and fed. We donks were almost
roasted from the sun's scorching rays. Close by was a deep well, but
no bucket in which to draw water. So Coonskin hitched a syrup can
to the rope and drew water for Pod and himself. Soon a drove of
cattle, accompanied by two ranchmen and a boy, came down to the
river to drink with us donks, just to show there was no hard feeling.
The lad laid down to drink from the stream.
"Here, boy, come and have a drink of cold water!" Pod called.
"That ain't fit to drink."
"Fitter'n that well water," answered the lad.
Said Pod: "I'd like to know the reason."
"Well," replied the lad, approaching, "I dropped a dead jackrabbit
in the well a week ago."
Somehow the men had drunk so much of that cool well-water
they hadn't room for dinner; too cool water I guess aint' good for one
when heated. After the dishes were washed, Pod took off everything
but his socks and collar-button, and wrote his newspaper letter,
while Coonskin went prospecting. Pretty soon the latter returned
with a sand turtle and, hitching it up in a rope harness, said he was
going to keep it for a pet. He named it Bill. He said it would make a
fine center-piece for the table; it would keep the Buffalo gnats and
mosquitos and flies off the victuals, and if tied at the tent door no
centipede or tarantula would dare enter. Pod thought it a good
scheme. So, when we packed up, Bill was put in one of my saddle
bags, without my knowing it. All new luggage was generally tied on to
Damfino; I supposed the turtle was.
After going a couple miles, I felt something mysterious crawling
on my back. I looked around, but my master was in the way; so I up
and kicked with all my might, determined to scatter that crawling
thing to the four winds, but, instead, threw Pod completely over my
head. Then I ran pell-mell down the desert trail, kicking and braying,
with that terrible something gnawing my hair and bouncing and
flopping with every jump I made. I ran fast and thought fast, and that
thing stuck fast. Suddenly, I stopped, laid down, and tried to roll on
it. This I couldn't do, on account of the saddle horn. But while I was
still trying, the rest of the party came up, and solved the mystery by
capturing the turtle, Bill; then they chained him on Damfino, and our
outfit moved on peacefully for several miles, the men talking merrily.
Said Pod, "Hitting the trail on the plains in summer isn't as
comfortable as driving a city ice-wagon.
"Not much," Coonskin returned; "but the donkeys and dog have
their woes, too."
"Verily so," confirmed the Professor. "For instance, there's
Damfino; she thinks she's awfully persecuted. Being a female, she
doesn't have much to say. But how about Mac? Doesn't he do more
kicking than all the rest put together?"
"Oh, well," Coonskin answered, "you see Mac regards himself a
pioneer and all the others mere tenderfeet."
I couldn't help grinning at the simple debate. The fact of the case
was, our caravan had been growing larger with every day's travel.
New articles were continually added. Cheese and I generally carried
the men; but to our saddles were hung guns, revolvers, cameras, and
the lantern, not to mention a bundle of blankets; all of which, added
to the burden of our thoughts, a nagging whip and a pair of spurs,
and a million and one buffalo gnats, mastodon mosquitos, and other
kindergarten birds of prey, tended to make us lose our mental
equilibrium a dozen times a day. In my case, there was a lump of
avoirdupois in the saddle ranging between 150 and 160 pounds.
Sometimes Pod would get out of his seat and walk a mile or two, to
relieve me. With Cheese it was much the same. But that old spinster,
Damfino, bore a burden, increasing daily. She was large and strong,
and couldn't appreciate fine sentiments, or fine stuffs either, even
complaining of sand in the wind, and coughed and snorted
continually. Her sawbuck saddle corset was laced tightly around her
robust bust, and to this unhealthsome vesture were hung on both
sides large canvas panniers, packed with canned goods, medicines,
salves, ink, cow-bells, vegetables, ham and bacon, vinegar, old shoes,
toilet articles, including currycomb, clothes, soap, flour, salt, baking-
powder, cheese, coffee, tea, kerosine oil, matches, cooking tools,
ammunition, folding kitchen range, and two dozen et ceteras. On top
and lopping over the panniers were roped the tent and tent-poles,
folding beds, canteens, musical instruments, axe, and axle-grease,
five iron picket-pins, packages of photos (for sale), a tin wash basin,
two tin pails, extra ropes, a half dozen paper pads, and a dozen more
et ceteras.
Beneath all that burden, she ambled along without a murmur,
swinging her ears to help her outwalk the rest, except Don, who kept
up a dog-trot.
A ranchman gave Pod some new potatoes one day (half of which I
yanked out of the tent door at night and devoured), and in reply to
his habitual inquiry, "Where'll we stow 'em?" Coonskin said, "On
Damfino, of course." When some canned goods were added to the list
of poisons, my master was puzzled. "Strap 'em on Damfino," advised
Coonskin. Pod bought some canteens. "Where'll we put these?" he
asked. "Oh, hang 'em on Damfino somewhere," said the wise
"Sancho." One day a large package of chromos came, and the
Professor was discouraged. "How the d—l can we carry these?" he
asked with bewilderment.
"Why," ejaculated the valet chuckling, "right on Damfino." Just
then that silent old maid looked at the men; and I saw blood in her
eye.
Picture if you can our party trailing along the banks of the Platte
that bright June afternoon. A few miles away loomed the cacti-
covered sand-dunes, and between them and the river stared the
desert of glistening alkali, sprinkled with cacti and sage, where an
occasional steer was scratching an existence—and mosquito bites.
We came to a muddy irrigation ditch, where the water had leaked
out. Across it was an alfalfa field, and beyond that an adobe ranch
house. We donks thought the mud in the ditch was stiff; the green
field looked tempting. Damfino whispered that she would make a
bolt for the field, if we would follow; and we said we would. At once
she shied into the ditch, and the next minute was knee-deep in
quicksand, and still sinking. Cheese and I stood riveted to the trail,
while the men just gaped at Damfino with open mouths. Damfino,
thinking she would soon be out of sight, brayed as she never brayed
before.
When Pod got his senses he yelled, "Let's pull her out!"
"What with? Every rope and strap's on Damfino," said the
truthful valet, running around like a head with the chicken cut off.
Coonskin tried to reach a rope and, losing his balance, put a foot in
the quicksand. Then, all excited, he attempted to pull his foot out,
and got them both in. The Professor tried to reach a bridle-rein to his
comrade, and went sprawling across the ditch on his corduroys and
whiskers, his arms elbow-deep in the mire. This put Don in a panic.
Seeing his master sinking, he grabbed his boots and pulled them off.
Then he fastened his teeth in Pod's trousers, and I expected to see
them come off too, but s' help me Balaam! the dog only pulled off one
trouser leg, when Coonskin managed to free himself by crawling over
Pod's corduroy road to dry land, and saved the day! At once, with a
bridle-rein, the valet roped the Professor's feet and pulled him out,
after which both men fastened the reins to Damfino's pack and tied
the other ends to the saddles of Cheese and myself. Then that she-
ass, wet and gray as a rat, with her burden, was dragged out of the
ditch into the trail. Well, that quicksand pulled all the bad nature out
of her, and she went a long time before she was tempted to leave the
trail again.
The men looked grateful as they wiped the brine from their faces,
and Pod remarked, "That was a narrow escape for all of us. Our
donkey party came within two of going ass-under, sure."
 CHAPTER XXXII.
At Buffalo Bill's ranch TOC

BY PYE POD.
 It has come about that now, to many a Royal Society, the Creation of a World is
little more mysterious than the cooking of a dumpling; concerning which last,
indeed, there have been minds to whom the question, How the apples were got in,
presented difficulties.—Sartor Resartus.

It was noon at Big Springs, the last village on the Union Pacific
Railroad in Nebraska, when I sat down to write in my dairy. I had
just finished a combination breakfast and dinner, warranted to kill
any appetite and keep it dead for twelve hours. Consequently I wrote
under great pressure.
Since striking Camp Coyote, I had shot prairie dogs, owls, jack-
rabbits, and gophers innumerable, but on Wednesday, June 30, I
killed my first rattlesnake. It was not the first we had seen, but the
first to lie in our path. I wanted to shoot it's head off, but instead of it
losing its head, I lost mine, and severed its vertebræ. The snake was
three feet five, and possessed eight rattles and a button. Cookskin
suggested that the button might come in handy in many ways. "You
know, Pod, you are always losing buttons."
These dreaded reptiles abound on the plains, particularly in
dogtowns, where they can dine on superfluous baby-dogs when
families become too large. Three sorts of creatures, including the owl
—animal, bird, and reptile—bunk together companionably, but have
quarrels of their own, doubtless, like mankind in domestic affairs. At
that season the South Platte was drained for irrigation in Colorado. I
was riding peaceably along, watching its morbid current and the gray
hills beyond, when suddenly my valet yelled to me, "Look out, Pod, a
rattler ahead!"
Coonskin was riding Cheese, who leaped to one side, but my own
steed, blinded by his spectacle-frames, walked on and stepped over
the coiled snake, which struck at my leg. Fortunately my canvas
legging protected me from the reptile's fangs, which glanced off,
letting him fall in the trail. Instantly I turned in my saddle and ended
its miserable existence.
The report of my revolver attracted some cowboys, who galloped
up on their rope horses and accompanied us to their adobe house a
few miles beyond. It was five in the afternoon, the day was hot, and
our journey long and dusty. They were a jolly lot. Thir ranch was a
square sod structure, without a floor, and sparingly furnished, but
cool and comfortable.
"We'll have hot biscuit for supper," said one of the cowboys.
"So you like cooking," I remarked; "I pride myself on the
dumplings I make, and my flapjacks are marvels of construction."
"Hang together well, I suppose," observed the cook, smiling and
piling buffalo chips in the stove.
"I haven't tasted dumplings since I visited the World's Fair," said
another.
"Well," declared the first speaker, "my tenderfoot friend, your
oven will soon be hot, and the flour, soda, shortening, and apples are
on the shelf. Anything else you need, ask for it."
I was in a bad fix; I remembered the parrot that got into trouble
with the bull-terrier by talking too much.
"It requires a long time to steam dumplings; it will delay supper,"
I protested.
"We shan't turn you out, if it takes you all night, but we'll shoot
the enamel off your front teeth if you don't make them apple
dumplings, and do your best," said a cowboy.
"All right, boys, I'll try my luck, and you can save time by
helping."
"Sure," all replied.
"Fetch me the shortening," I called.
"Right before your eyes," said one.
"Blamed if I can see it," I explained. The fellow put his hands on a
cake of greasy-looking substance.
"That's soap," I said, remonstrating, with a chuckle.
"All we use for shortening," apologized the cook; "don't see much
butter or lard out on this here desert."
I fell to with a will. Before long my dough was mixed. As I rolled it
out with a tin can, I directed a cowboy to put in the apples and roll up
the dough. Soon the dumplings were in the steamer, and the cook
began to prepare other eatables for the meal. Then, my duty done, I
watched two fellows throw the lariat, and shoot the fly specks off
Coonskin's hat in midair.
 At last, five hearty eaters sat down to dinner. The cook's hot
biscuits, potatoes, bacon, eggs and coffee were delicious, and I
devoured them greedily. But in the middle of our repast I turned my
head in time to detect the cook meddling with the dumplings.
"Shouldn't take off the cover till they're done," I shouted; "makes
'em heavy."
"Didn't take it off—lifted itself off," explained the man, regarding
me first, then the steamer. "Man alive, the dumplings are as big as
cabbages."
"And 'tain't more'n likely they've got their growth yet," said
Coonskin, who examined the wonders.
"Gracious!" I exclaimed. "How many apples did you cram into
each dumpling?"
"Only fifteen or twenty," the cook returned; "awfully small, you
know."
"That explains the size of them," said I. "You've got a half dozen
whole apples in each dumpling, and a peck or more in the steamer.
Don't you know dried fruit swells?"
"But how am I to keep the lid on the steamer," asked the hungry
cook, wistfully eying the disappearing meal.
"Sit on it, you crazy loon," suggested a companion.
And the fellow did. Presently there was a deafening report, and
the cook was lifted off the steamer, while dumplings flew in every
direction, striking the ceiling, and then, from heaviness, dropping on
the floor. One broke my plate into a dozen pieces. Another hot and
saucy dumpling shot through the bursted side of the steamer, hitting
one of the cowboys in the eye.
"Just my luck," I said; "they would have been as light as a
feather."
"Light!" exclaimed the injured fellow with a handkerchief against
his scalded optic. "It was the heaviest thing that ever hit me, let me
tell you, and I've been punching cattle seven years."
When the excitement was over, and we had found sufficient grub
to complete our meal, all assembled in the cool outer air, where
Coonskin and I entertained with our musical instruments until
bedtime.
 Next morning, on my suggestion, a cowboy threw his lariat round
my body good-naturedly and pulled me over, but before I could right
myself Don took three bounds and pulled the fellow down by the
shoulder, frightening one and all. I shouted so loudly to the dog that
I was hoarse for a week. That demonstration of Don's loyalty was a
revelation to me. The man was not injured, although his coat was
torn.
The lack of energy and enterprise of the town of the western
plains was both surprising and amusing. I expected a package of
photos at Willow Island. When I called for it I was informed that the
railroad station had burned a few months before, and that their
express stopped at Cozad, which I had passed through. So I wrote to
have the package forwarded to a station farther west.
Gothenburg, the next town, was in a decline, the reaction of a
boom. A traveler approaching it expects to find a business center.
Many stores and dwellings were of brick, but whole rows were vacant
at the time. The soothing melody of the squalling infant was only a
memory to the village druggist; the itinerant butcher and milkman
had ceased their daily rounds; and all that was left to distinguish the
half-deserted village from the desert was an occasional swallow that
went down the parched mouth of a chimney. There is another town
characteristic of the plains. I had a letter to post at Paxton, but forgot
it; some miles beyond, a ranchman whom we met said I would find a
post-office at Korty, five miles further on. After traveling two hours,
we could see no vestige of a village anywhere. Don ran ahead to the
top of every sand hill and stood on his hind feet to have the first peep
at the mysterious town. I came to the conclusion the ranchman had
said twenty-five miles instead of five. Finally the trail approached the
railroad.
"I see the town of Korty!" my valet exclaimed.
"Where?" I asked.
"There. Plain as day. Can't you see it?" he asked, pointing straight
ahead.
"I must confess I can't," I replied. "Let me look over your finger."
Then I saw it. It wasn't one hundred feet away. A single white-
painted post stood beside the track, and on it was nailed a cross-bar,
lettered in bold type, "Korty;" underneath was a letter-box. That was
the town. There was no section house, no water tank, no break in the
wire fence, and there being, of course, no general delivery window in
the "post-office," I did not ask for my mail.
On the way to North Platte, we passed the site of old Ft.
McPherson, where Buffalo Bill, the celebrated scout, once lived and
won his fame and title by providing buffalo meat for the
Government, and also the site of a notorious Pawnee village, now
called Pawnee Springs. We reached North Platte, situated at the
confluence of the North and South Platte rivers, which form the great
River Platte, Saturday afternoon, and spent Sunday in a manner to
meet the approval of the most pious.
That first evening I lectured from a large dry-goods box on a
prominent corner.
Sunday afternoon an old friend and classmate drove me into the
country to the famous "Scout's Rest Ranch," the estate of Mr. Cody
(Buffalo Bill), where I saw a herd of buffalo and a cornfield of 500
acres.
"There is quite a contrast between your cornfield and mine," I
said to the manager.
"How big a cornfield have you?"
"Just a small one," I replied. "One acher on each big toe."
"I see, only sufficient for your own use," came the response; "your
'stock in' trade, as it were." Then the ranchman purchased a photo,
and we two grown-up school boys drove back to town, in time to
escape a thunder shower.
The country between North Platte and Julesburg is a desolate and
barren region. Occasionally we could see a ranch house, sometimes
cattle grazing on I knew not what. There was plenty of alkali grass in
the bottom lands of the Platte, and further back on the mesa, patches
of the short and nutritious buffalo grass, half seared by the scorching
sun. The railway stations, with one or two exceptions, consisted of
water tanks and section houses, where water could be procured. At
Ogalala we met a train-load of Christian Endeavorers, and had a
chance to quench our thirst.
 CHAPTER XXXIII.
Fourth of July in the desert TOC

BY MAC A'RONY.
What a thrice double ass
Was I, to take this drunkard for a god,
And worship this dull fool!
—Tempest.

Where and how to celebrate the Fourth of July greatly concerned

Pye Pod. The third was spent in Julesburg, a town in Colorado, two
miles west of the boundary line; as Sunday was the Fourth, we
naturally expected a lively programme for Saturday.
We were disappointed. Everybody had gone off on an excursion,
and Julesburg was dead. So my master, realizing the long journey
before us, inquired as to the possibility of obtaining an extra donkey,
and was told of one, some six miles from town. He rode in a buggy to
a ranch right after lunch and brought back the prettiest damsel I ever
saw. Her name was Skates; Pod said he so named her because she
ran all the way and beat his pride-broken, wind-broken horse into
town. I gave Skates a loving smile, but she gave me a look, which
said, "Keep your distance, young feller." So I did. But I lost my heart
to that girl then and there.
Pod noticed my leaning toward Skates, and asked me my
intentions. I frankly told him. "But what nonsense for a youth of four
years," he remarked. "Mac, be patient; wait until you are of age, at
least."
Time was precious, and we could not tarry. That afternoon we set
out for Sterling, sixty miles into the desert, where, it was said, there
would be a big time on the fifth.
Monday dawned cloudy and threatening, as is usual with
celebration days. The tent door was open, and Skates and I were
looking in, I waiting for a chance to pull a bag of eatables out of the
tent for her.
"What is your programme for to-day?" Pod asked his valet.
No answer. The question was repeated; still no response. Then
my master turned drowsily on his pillow, and beheld Coonskin with
bloodshot eyes and the only whiskey bottle clasped lovingly to his
breast. The valet wanted to say something, but his lips refused to
speak. It was evident that his celebration had begun the night before.
Pod sat up and rubbed his eyes to make sure he was not dreaming,
and then asked the fellow why he drank all the emergency whiskey.
"R-r-r-r-r-r-r-rat-schnake bite-bite-bited me—d—drank whisky
t'shave life," stammered the youth. "H-h-h-hic-have shome, Prof."
Pod looked mad. He up and dressed, and mixed soda and water
and lemon juice, and made Coonskin drink it. Soon the tipsy fellow
tried to dress, but finally gave it up and went to sleep. Two hours
later he awoke quite sober, and came out to where Pod was currying
me for the celebration, and showed him his programme. I haven't
space to give it in full.
One feature was an obstacle race, the prize for the winner being a
quart bottle of snake-bit (whiskey). Coonskin said, as his excuse for
drinking the whiskey, that he was certain of winning the race, but
afraid the bottle might be broken before the event. Pod thought that
reasonable enough, and forgave him; but he told me confidentially
that he didn't know what he should do if he were bitten by a
rattlesnake without whiskey at hand. I suggested, in such event, he
should point a revolver at Coonskin's garret, where his brains ought
to have been, and make him suck out the poison.
The obstacle race began at eleven in the morning. The start was
made from the tent door; the course and conditions were as follows:
Run to the fifth fence-post down the trail, alongside the railroad
track; crawl through the barbed-wire fence four times between
different posts on the way back to the tent, without tearing clothes;
creep through the legs of the little portable table (purchased in
Julesburg) without rolling off an egg resting on it; run a hundred
yards and unpicket one of the donkeys and ride it round the tent
three times with a spoon in hand, holding an egg; ride the donk back
to his picket-pin and crawl between its hind legs without disturbing
the animal's equilibrium; stand in the tent door and shoot some hair
off one of the donkey's tails without touching the tail proper; then
lead that donkey to the tent and hitch him to the turtle, Bill.
Cheating, if detected, forfeited the prize.
Well, while there were two starters, there was only one finisher. It
seems that Coonskin shot a piece off Cheese's tail (improper, the
donk said), and, in consequence, man and donk disappeared over the
horizon, without leaving their future address or the date for their
return.
Coonskin rode Cheese into camp after dark. Then he rubbed axle-
grease on Cheese's sensitive part, and prepared the delayed dinner.
Next came fire-works—Roman candles, firecrackers, and pin-wheels
—after which both men retired, fancying they had the jolliest Fourth
ever witnessed by man or donkey in the history of the Colorado
desert.
 CHAPTER XXXIV.
Bitten by a rattler TOC

BY PYE POD.
Sancho Panza hastened to his master's help as fast as his ass could go, and
when he came up he found the knight unable to stir, such a shock had Rosinante
given him in the fall.—Don Quixote.

The casualty, which terminated our celebration on the fifth,

seemed to portend bad luck. The metaphorical lightning first struck
me. We struck camp, that hot July day, before the sun was an hour
high, and a mile beyond trailed through a dog-town reservation. I
had long been desirous of securing a prairie dog to have mounted; as
a rule one can pick off these shy creatures only at long rifle range.
This morning, stealing up behind a cornfield, I wounded a dog, then
dropping my gun, ran to catch him before he could escape into his
hole. Crawling through a barbed-wire fence without afterward
appearing in dishabille is considered by a tenderfoot the feat of feats.
Before I reached the hole half undressed the dog had tumbled into it.
He must have made a mistake, however, for out the fellow came, and
made for another hole. I grabbed him, but instantly dropped him, for
he tried to bite me. Then, like a shot, he dived into the second hole,
and I thrust my arm in to pull him out. But my hand came out quite
as fast as it went in. It was bitten; and at the mouth of the hole I now
detected for the first time the tail of a rattlesnake. That was an awful
moment, What should I do? My whiskey was gone; I had no antidote
for the poison. I rushed to where Coonskin was waiting with my
outfit.
"Make for the house!" he exclaimed.
A ranch house stood some two miles away, but not a soul was in
sight. Still, that seemed to be my only salvation; I realized a painful
death was the only alternative. With a hundred other thoughts
rushing into my head, I ran toward the distant house. Coonskin
began picketing the donkeys, and promised to follow.
 While racing madly through the cacti and sage, I thought of my
past, from three months upward. Just when I had reached an
episode, which almost ended my reckless career at the age of ten, I
heard the sound of galloping hoofs, and, a moment later, a young
woman reined her steed at my side, dismounted and gave me her
horse.
"Into the saddle, quick, man!" she cried. "Mother has turpentine
and whiskey. The horse will take the fence and ditch. Pull leather,
stick to the saddle, never mind the stirrups!" and to the horse—"Git
home, Topsy!—Run for your life, old girl!" Like a flash, the big mare
sped forward with the velocity of the wind.
To pull leather, in the parlance of the cowboy, means to grip the
saddle with the hands. For a cow-puncher to pull leather is deemed
disgraceful; for Pod, it was excusable. Although the mare fairly flew,
she did not travel half fast enough to suit me. With reins round the
saddle-horn, I gripped the saddle with my left hand and sucked the
bite on my right, but suddenly the mare took a hop-skip-and-jump
over the fence and ditch; fell to her knees, and threw me over her
head.
When I sat up, I saw a woman in the door of the house, yet a half
mile away, no doubt, wondering how a maniac happened to be on
her daughter's steed. The next moment, Coonskin arived all out of
breath, and assisted me to the house. Before we could fully explain
the situation, the good woman disappeared, soon to return with a
bottle of turpentine, which she turned nozzle down over the snake
bite, while my valet poured whiskey down my throat.
They say it takes a long time and much whiskey to affect one
bitten by a rattler, but this case seemed to be an exception; in a few
moments, my head was going round, and I prostrate on a couch. My
kind nurse looked curiously at the turpentine, and finally said it was
queer it didn't turn green, as it should in the case of a rattle-snake
bite.
A half hour passed and still there was no change. Then when I
repeated my story of how the thing happened, she grinned, and said
she guessed it was the prairie dog and not the snake that bit me, after
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